Find open access articles

"Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment."(SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).

There are multiple ways for scholarly works to be open access:

Authors self-archive in repositories

Authors choose to self-archive a version of the published article (pre-print or post print) in a repository that is free to access

Open access journals

Articles are published in open access journals

Hybrid model

Authors choose to pay for their articles to be published open access in traditional publications

Authors self-archive in repositories

The repositories can be at institutional or central level, or can be specialized in a specific subject.

Public repository for National Transportation Library’s collection of over 30,000 items. Members of the transportation community and the general public can use ROSA P for all the open data and publications NTL acquires, manages and preserves for their benefit.

Institutional repositories

Discovering each institutional repository is a difficult task. Instead, it is recommended the use of specialized search engines to discover repositories of interest.

Public Library of Science (PLoS) publishes several well-established open access, peer-reviewed journals covering an array of disciplines in the sciences including PLOS Biology, PLOS One, and PLOS Pathogens.

Hybrid journals

Publishers can offer a mix of traditional and open access articles or they offer free delayed access to their publications. See the individual journal home pages and check what articles are available for free.

Tools for finding open access versions of articles

For any articles you cannot access (databases or Google) I would suggest using additional tools that could help finding open access versions of those articles (meaning pre-prints or post-prints). These tools are:

The National Academies Press (NAP) was created by the National Academies to publish the reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. All titles are in PDF format that can be downloaded for free by the chapter or the entire book